A lifetime income or a wrap investment is a series of equal payments at regular intervals as a form of financial investment entitling the investor to a series of annual sums upon maturation of the investment. Examples of lifetime income investment include annuities, monthly insurance payments, and pension payments. The payments (e.g., deposits) may be made weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, lump sum, or at any other interval of time. Many institutions offer investment programs for their employees as a part of their benefit package. These investments are highly valuable because employee's income is deferred until the liquidation (e.g., the money is withdrawn, distributed, or matured by the plan sponsor), which reduces the current tax liability for the employee. Supplemental retirement investments provide the same tax savings when workers contribute to them through an employer with pretax income. As the processing power of computers allow for greater computer functionality and the internet technology era allows for interconnectivity between computing systems, many parties involved (e.g., employer, participant or the employee, the investment recordkeepers, and investment providers) utilize computer implemented resources to manage the investment accounts, provide information, and monitor the progress of their investment account. In today's world, non-computer investment management methods have been rendered obsolete because use of computer-implemented methods provides fast, accurate, and efficient results that are in-tune with consumer expectations.
Since the implementation of these more sophisticated online tools, however, several shortcomings in these technologies have been identified and have created a new set of impediments. For example, many recordkeepers do not have a method to make all the investment datasets uniform and transferrable. As a result, most recordkeepers (even when both recordkeepers manage annuities associated with the same participant) are not able to effectively communicate. Furthermore, investment accounts are not portable and may not be transferred when an employee changes jobs. In many instances, the employee must either wait to liquidate (e.g., cash out) the amount of money after maturation of the investment (which may include annuitized option) or pay heavy penalties in order to cash out and subsequently re-invest the money into another investment plan provided by employee's new employer. This discourages many from investing in investment income accounts, thus negatively affecting the industry's objectives. Furthermore, many recordkeepers may user different computer infrastructure, which creates technical difficulties when combining different datasets associated with different institutions.